Finding (and Capturing) The Perfect Lead

VO: 

Hi, and welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, where we get perspectives from industry thought leaders about strategies that are unifying marketing and sales cycles to help accelerate growth inside your world. 

Richard Lane: 

Welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, an industry podcast that connects the worlds of sales and marketing one guest at a time. I’m your Host, Richard Lane, Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of durhamlane. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Karen Kulinski. Karen is the EMEA Marketing and Communications Director for ADLINK who help build and deploy Edge AI solutions to connect people, places, and things faster. Karen, great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being with us. 

Karen Kulinski: 

Hi, Richard. I’m excited to be here today, joining you as the guest for this conversation. I’m truly honoured to share my thoughts and insights with your audience. I’m looking forward to diving into the topics we’ll be exploring today. So let’s make this a memorable, insightful, and maybe funny session for our audience. 

Richard Lane: 

Excellent. Well, looking forward to that, Karen, very much. Firstly then, to get us started, perhaps you could introduce yourself and give us a quick anecdote about your career or experience from your career so far. 

Karen Kulinski: 

Sure. I’m a Marketing B2B Leader for more than 25 years. I have a lot of experience with international companies across all industry. My favourite industry, I would say, is tech companies and engineering companies, for the last 10 years. I have a lot of leadership experience with MarTech organisation and as well transformational businesses. Transformational, I mean companies wanting to grow and bring in new innovation in marketing. I have extensive experience in marketing and communication strategies globally, especially on lead generation because I find lead generation is one of the most important topics for companies to grow. If you personalise your content, you know your target audience, and you make your customers engaging with that across the buying journey, you will for sure increase your lead conversion rate. 

Richard Lane: 

As listeners will know, this is a passion of mine too, certainly with durhamlane being a demand and lead generation outsourcing agency. So to get us started maybe on that topic then, what are you most passionate about in the world of sales and marketing? 

Karen Kulinski: 

Efficient lead generation and how to get the perfect lead is something that really engages me to find an opportunity that really turns into a business for a company. What does it mean to be a perfect lead and what needs to be done for that? Achieving an efficient lead generation begins with a thorough understanding of your target audience and their pain points. Utilise data-driven insights to identify the perfect leads and tailor your marketing messages accordingly. Once you have captured the interest of your audience, nurture the leads, lead nurturing is also a very important part in this, with a personalised, again, a focus on personalised and relevant content, guiding them through the sales funnel smoothly. Then implement an effective lead scoring system, so rating the leads that you’re getting into your system, prioritise higher quality prospects for your sales teams and assuring a seamless handover, regularly analyse your findings and engage with sales teams frequently. All those topics I’m passionate about. 

Richard Lane: 

Just one thing. You said that you talk about lead scoring. Could you say a little bit more on how you do that? 

Karen Kulinski: 

We are working with marketing technology, so MarTech. We are using, for example, at ADLINK, Marketo. Marketo is a marketing automation tool where the leads coming in across the buying journey. The more you engage with your customers, via this marketing tool, the more points they score into the system. Once we achieved a certain points in the system, it falls out into the marketing sales funnel, and there you will decide, as a marketing team, if you pass it on to the sales team or not. 

This is a part of marketing technology. It’s not a different tool. It’s inside of the tools, so it helps you with prioritisation of leads. 

Richard Lane: 

Absolutely. We’ll talk about MarTech and technology in a bit, but interested to know about lead scoring and how you work that. Another thing we were wondering when we spoke prior to discussion was around your work at ADLINK, and obviously, in EMEA, we have lots of different languages and different countries with different languages, different ways of working. How do you operate across those different countries as one team? 

Karen Kulinski: 

At ADLINK, we believe in a multifaceted approach to the demand generation and efficient lead generation. Our strategy revolves around some key principles actually. So this is for all countries, doesn’t matter which language. So first of all, understanding customer needs, deeply understand your target audience, their pain points, I mentioned already before, and the challenges they face. So you can create your content around those. The more you understand the customer, the more compelling will be your content. Then the content, marketing excellence, I would say. We are spending a lot of time at ADLINK building a piece of content that demonstrate that we understand the pain points of our customers. This can be blog posts, white papers, case studies, we choose to be addressed at different stages of the buying journey. So the content not only captures interest, but also position ADLINK as an industry thought leader. 

Then leveraging multiple channels is really important. So we employ multichannel approach to reach out to our target audience. This includes email marketing, for example, social media outlet, webinars, events, search engine marketing, you name it. Can be many more. By engaging with our prospects via different platforms, we increase the chance of capturing their interest and therefore the perfect lead. And then, there are many things we can do, but I think one very important one is optimising landing pages. So we are designing landing pages for conversion. They needs to be user-friendly, visually appealing, and have compelling calls to action, the CTA call to action, that encourage visitors to take a desired approach to click on the box, signing up for webinar, downloading resource or whatever. Another important point is lead nurturing and automation. You mentioned MarTech already, Richard. 

So lead nurturing sometimes I see in businesses is neglected. Not every lead turns automatically into a business. No. They need a lot of work. So the leads need to be nurtured. So the marketing tools like Marketo, HubSpot, you name them, will help you to build this journey within this lead nurturing process so you can stay in touch with your customers. And then most importantly as well, data-driven marketing decisions. So in the past, marketing was a lot of feelings or about how a visual looks like. Nowadays is everything in marketing about data. So we rely on data and analytics to measure the success of our lead generation and efforts continually. When I say continually, this is a never ending process. You always optimise your metrics and your conversations and try to improve on engagement levels and ROI, of course, and then we will fine tune the strategy for even getting better results. 

Two more points I find important. Alignment between marketing and sales. Marketing cannot do this alone. So we are the support function actually to sales, helping them to convert into a business. So we need to sit together and build our personas and target audiences, and we need to ensure that both are on the same page actually, in order to convert those leads. If there’s no sales connection, it’ll be difficult for marketing to really build a stable lead generation process and even a successful one. So this is really important. And then the continuous improvement. So never stop improving your marketing campaigns, every day you look at those things, at your numbers, and continue improving. It’s a very detailed process. 

Richard Lane: 

A great summary there from a marketing point of view. One thing that we’re very passionate about at durhamlane is linking together the worlds of marketing and sales through our services. To be fully transparent for our listeners, ADLINK is a customer for durhamlane. So we’re very, very proud to be able to support your efforts. How closely and how well aligned are your sales and marketing teams, and has that been a challenging process and is that something you need to continually work on or does it come naturally to the business? 

Karen Kulinski: 

I have to say, Richard, this was a journey. At ADLINK, we are quite advanced at lead generation, so we have integrated IT tools, marketing and sales tools together so we can build up the full sales pipeline and make it visible. Nevertheless, salespeople are very busy and they don’t have, sometimes, the time to look at every lead. That’s why we are also using agencies like durhamlane to help us to find the perfect lead when it’s not yet maybe in the lead scoring process very high. So if it’s a high interest lead, assessment will convert it immediately. 

So that means a certain lead need to have a certain standard, it needs to be a high buying interest, there needs to be a certain engagement before, and there needs to be intention to buy a product, like I mentioned already. So this will capture the interest. If it’s not there, we go into nurture or if we see more potential, we give it to a third party, like you are helping us to turn the MQL into our SQL. So the process is not always smooth, but it’s getting smoother and smoother, and we are continuously working on that. We have regular meetings around this and we are involving the sales teams in our campaigns. So they know what’s going on, actually. 

Richard Lane: 

Well that’s key, isn’t it? Because I think we have a responsibility when we’re proactively going into the market for our customers to deliver back insight, but as well, your salespeople need to be telling you and the marketing function, what their prospects and customers are saying and what they’re looking for, don’t they? 

Karen Kulinski: 

Yes, they know the market, they know their customers. If we capture the insight that they have, we can build a much more powerful campaign which convert into something. So I think we need to do that more often with our sales team and more regularly. So sales and marketing should really become truly one team. 

Richard Lane: 

Mar Sales, I think we’ve called it on this podcast before. So one thing we try and do on this side is to give our listeners some sort of actions and takeaways that they can put into their own practise, and I think sometimes the best way to learn is thinking about some of the mistakes that we’ve made. So I was just wondering, are there any mistakes to avoid that you’ve seen people make previously when it comes to building demand and lead generation strategies? Or what are the things, perhaps with a bit of hindsight, you might’ve done differently? 

Karen Kulinski: 

Yes, there are common mistakes that people make when building lead and demand generation strategies. You cannot avoid all of this, and sometimes it’s simply a budget or a time issue, but you can strive for effectiveness. Sometimes what I see is that companies, they do not take enough time to research their audience. So market intelligence is neglected. That means you don’t know enough about your audience and then you cannot build the content that you need. Also, buying journey has changed so much during the years, and I see still marketing teams using our old buying journey and not adapting to the needs of our customers. If we don’t tailor this according to their needs, we will not address the right audience and the campaign and the lead gen efforts will fail. Unfocused CTAs, I see so many blurry CTAs, it doesn’t appeal to me, it wouldn’t appeal to my customers. 

If I’m not precise on what I want them to do, they will not do it. It has to be a clear call to action, needs to be positioned right on the landing page of a website, and it needs to be easily understood. And I see many landing pages where it’s not the case actually. Also, I can talk for hours about lead nurturing, and I talk to experts and they don’t do this, and I say, “How can you build a lead pipeline by not doing this?” Because lead nurturing requires specific skills. 

You need to know in depth about MarTech and how this work, and you have to have different content for different buying stages. So you need content strategy, you need an expert actually doing that, and it takes a lot of effort for a company to do that, and it needs a really expert knowledge. So you need to build that. And this is really crucial, I would say. These are some of the things I see, but also inconsistent branding. There can be so many pitfalls actually that it’s not aligned with a total customer experience. So I think we should all try to be a perfect customer experience, but I think we will never get there. We just can try to avoid some of those things. 

Richard Lane: 

I think there are some great takeaways there, and some of what you talked about is really basic, and it’s obvious, but people forget to do the obvious and forget to do the basic, don’t they? But the call to action, so important, whereabouts on the page, what it is, it has to resonate, and ultimately you have to understand, or as best you can, put your feet in the shoes of your buyer, as one might say. I think the other area that comes often as an error, I think is people don’t give campaigns long enough. They don’t give enough time for it to play through because it takes time to be able to connect with people. It takes time to get into their window and to be recognised. So that’s probably something else. I think people’s attention span maybe sometimes moves too quickly and they think, well, that didn’t work. We’ll do something different. And you end up jumping around and never really fulfilling any campaign properly. 

Karen Kulinski: 

This is absolutely correct, and they are different natures of campaigns. If you run a nurture campaign, this campaign could run two years, and you have a big, high impact campaign. This campaign run three to six months. So there are different campaigns, from the length, depending on what we want to achieve, but you’re right, we are not giving it long enough sometimes, and then we don’t spend enough time to analyse the data afterwards. So capturing the lead is one thing, but also analysing what might customer has said or where the customer came in. This kind of things are very important. So I’m spending a lot of time in the reports, to be honest, to try to find the right data and the right analysis to inform our board, because our CMO, Jim Liu, who’s also our CEO of the company, he’s very interested in marketing activities and the value of marketing, but the value is for marketing for ADLINK. So we need to measure this thoroughly, and we are reporting it out frequently to him. 

Richard Lane: 

Very good. So having your CEO as also your CMO means that marketing is going to be very visible, doesn’t it? 

Karen Kulinski: 

Yes. 

Richard Lane: 

One of the challenges you’ve probably seen is that companies invest a lot in technology, so in MarTech, but then don’t necessarily use it to the best of their ability. So have you got any hints or tips for listeners on what to do or what not to do when it comes to marketing tech tools? 

Karen Kulinski: 

Absolutely. Investing in marketing technology can be a significant asset, but it’s essential to use it effectively to maximise its impact. You need some thoughts behind it when you want to bring it into the company. So what to do when thinking about implementing MarTech tools? It’s important that you have clear objectives. Define your marketing objectives, align them with the capabilities of the technology. Which tool is right for me? Is it a big tool like Marketo? It’s a huge companies. Or it’s maybe a smaller one like HubSpot. It differs very much in pricing there. So having a specific plan helps to find the right technology, and then training and education. It’s very much a neglected area. You need to train your marketing team on those tools. You need to have an expert on the technology so they can explore the full potential. They need to keep on educating on those because these tools are changing frequently and the features and the best practise is also changing. 

And then you need to check if it’s integrating with existing systems. So many companies have a lot of systems, so it’s a marketing job, but it’s also more becoming an IT job. You need to work very closely with your IT department to see how the data can flow seamlessly throughout your company. So for ADLINK, it was integrated Marketo into Salesforce, but this is something IT needs to do. And then testing, testing, testing. This is always something. Sending out, AB testing, different strategies and getting the insight that you need to convince the board or whoever you need to convince this is the right tool. 

Then data security and privacy compliance is also, get your legal department always involved in this kind of activities, is very crucial. I see this that legal is not involved in buying a MarTech tool, but they need to be involved from the first hour actually to see if everything is set properly. So it’s very important. And I would say what not to do is don’t rely only on tech. Technology can help you, it’s a tool, but it shouldn’t become higher good over human creativity. It should go hand in hand. So only relying on technology will destroy your creativity in your team. So it’s really important. 

Richard Lane: 

Absolutely, 100%. Karen, a new feature for our new series of The Insiders is that we’ve got Ask the Expert moment. So we’ve got a question in from James, and James has said, “What is your perspective on an organisational over reliance on tech leading to reduce creativity and differentiation in Rev Ops teams?” So it’s almost like he listened to your previous answer, but he can’t have done yet because he’s not heard the recording. But your perspective on organisational over reliance on technology, do you have a comment on that for James? 

Karen Kulinski: 

Yes. So this is what I mentioned already before, I think, in my questions. So I think organisational over reliance on technology, especially in revenue operations teams can have a both positive and negative consequences. While technology undoubtedly streamlines processes and improves efficiencies, and excessive reliance on it can lead on to reduce creativity and can lead to de-motivation of the team. So technology and human creativity needs to go hand in hand, and human doesn’t need to feel like replaced by technology, but it needs to be seen as a tool to make them more successful. I think this is where the manager comes in and the leaders to help the team to overcome that really to be more successful on those lead generation campaigns. It’s also the striking of the right balance and should be also encourage a culture of innovation, a culture that allows experimentation with technology and creative problem solving, and empower team members to propose and test things, put new ideas forward outside the boundaries of existing technology, and combine a human insight with the data insight. 

So humans have data. We have very smart people sitting in marketing teams. So while data is invaluable and is accurate, combine it with the insights and experience of team members and gain a holistic understanding of customer behaviour and preferences. So technology can help you to get the understanding of customers, but an expert in your team can help you to do the same. And invest in employee training and professional development to ensure team members can leverage technology effectively by maintaining the creative edge. So there will be more motivated doing that and see tech as an enabler, not as a constraint. Emphasise that technology is a means to an end and not the end itself. Empower teams to use technology as an enabler, achieve their goals by keeping this customer experience at the forefront. 

Richard Lane: 

Absolutely. I heard a great line from Gartner at a conference recently. They said, “Don’t see technology as something you use, but see technology as a peer that sits beside you.” And I think that’s where we’re starting to go, so great. That was a wonderful answer. Thank you, Karen. So we’ve got a couple more questions to cover. One thing would be talking about actionable insights. So I think you’ve shared lots and lots of information, and I know there’ll be a huge number of things that people can take away and go and do to make their marketing function really, really effectively. But is there any one thing, that if people could just do one thing following listening to this podcast, what would you have them do? 

Karen Kulinski: 

I would say, an actionable tip, and I talked already about this. It’s a hands-on tip really, not a strategic tip. It’s a hands-on tip. Because I’ve seen the many bad landing pages out there. So it’s optimising lead capture forms. If you want to grow your business and you want a great lead coming into your website or on your landing page, work on your web landing pages. Keep it simple. Use clear CTAs, offer value, great content. Use progressive profiling. Try to mobile optimise your landing page, test, AB testing. A compelling headline is even better than a non-comp compelling headline. Test, test, test. Position your brand in a way you want it to be positioned and go for the next perfect lead. 

Richard Lane: 

Next perfect lead. Excellent. But that call to action, call to action is the key. I think you’re absolutely spot on with that. So Karen, thank you so much for being a guest on our Insiders podcast. I think the episode is packed full of actionable insight for our listeners. Really enjoyed speaking with you. It’s wonderful having you as a customer and learning more about the inside operation of your market team ADLINK. So thank you very much. 

Karen Kulinski: 

Thank you, Richard, very much for the opportunity. It was a very interesting conversation. Let’s go together with our customers to find the perfect lead. So you are part of the journey. I’m part of the journey. I think this is our mission, both of us. 

Richard Lane: 

Let’s do it. Great. Well, thank you for tuning into The Insiders. Please subscribe on your preferred podcasting site to ensure you’re notified of all new episodes as and when they’re published. If you’d like to learn more about durhamlane and our unique method of selling at a high level, visit durhamlane.com for more information and we will see you again soon. 

VO: 

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